However, winning a second trophy within a decade put Spielberg in rare company. Spielberg had chased the Oscar for decades, with perceived “snubs” for both The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun. In many ways, the turning point came after the director won his second Best Director Oscar for his work on Saving Private Ryan. There’s a similar competing impulse in Spielberg’s later career. Maybe genius really is balancing two competing ideas simultaneously. In the 1980s and 1990s, he paired populist hits with potential awards contenders: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Always in 1989, Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List in 1993, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Amistad in 1997.
A prolific director, Spielberg will often release two films in the same year, designed for different audiences. These competing aspects of Spielberg’s persona are part of what makes him so compelling. It’s impossible to imagine any other director making The Color Purple the fourth highest-grossing film of its year. That’s not exactly the distinction for Spielberg, whose “smaller” projects were frequently successful box office draws.
This approach is similar to the classic “one for them, one for me” model, where directors would balance the demands of commercial movie-making with their own esoteric interests by alternating between financially viable films and personal passion projects. Spielberg spent the first few decades of his career balancing his blockbuster credibility with more earnest fare, following Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Spielberg was one of the few of his generation to survive the collapse of New Hollywood, largely by leaning into his populist tendencies, following the poorly received 1941 with the crowd-pleasing Raiders of the Lost Ark. Jaws is frequently credited with kickstarting the modern blockbuster trend. Spielberg’s contributions were particularly striking. Filmmakers like Brian DePalma, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola reshaped what was possible within studio filmmaking, pushing away from the old assembly line productions in favor of something different. Spielberg defined populist cinema, coming up with the “Movie Brat” generation that defined and shaped the New Hollywood of the 1970s. Depending on whom you ask, Spielberg is “the defining American populist of his generation,” “possibly the greatest American director,” or even simply “synonymous with cinema.” Writer Arthur Ryel-Lindsey might have been a bit sarcastic when he declared that “Steven Spielberg is American culture,” but there is some truth to that sentiment. He is a filmmaker that has defined generations of cinema. Steven Spielberg is one of the greatest working directors.
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